Rigol scope owners/users

[user 37518]

Recently there's been some new postings about Rigol scopes, it seems there is a timing issue bug affecting many of their scopes. It may not be a problem if your day to day use consists only of audio sinewaves but perhaps the digital guys will suffer more from this. Next time you are thinking on buying a cheap chinese scope you may want to reconsider and remember that you get what you paid for. Im not free of guilt, I own a GW Instek scope, doesn't seem to have any problems thou.

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/517690/rigol-ds1074-oscilloscope-shows-very-wrong-timing

and

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/rigol-1054z-and-1074z-timing-problems-at-500ms-timescale-and-24m-memory-depth/

 

[ruffrecords]

I bought a cheap Rigol scope but I don't use it any more. I found that the LCD display spews outs all sorts of crap that gets into the scope probes. I bought an old 20MHz analogue scope of eBay for about £40 and use that instead now.

Cheers

Ian

 

[user 37518]

There are a lot of people who buy the Rigol scopes, based a lot on the opinions of YouTube star Dave Jones, and also because they offer a lot of features at an affordable price. Rigol is the #1 selling scope in sites such as tequipment.net , so a lot of hobbyists have one. To me its unacceptable to have these kind of bugs in their scopes. Like I said, if you are just looking at sinewaves, there shouldn't be any problem, but if you rely on precise timing of clock signals and so on these scopes are useless.

Curious to know what model do you have Ian?

 

[rob_gould]

I've got a 1052. Never had a problem with it.  But I only use it for audio rate signals.

It's served me perfectly and represents excellent value for money for the use I've put it to.

It'll be interesting to see whether Rigol addresses this. 

 

[user 37518]

I've got a 1052. Never had a problem with it.  But I only use it for audio rate signals.

It's served me perfectly and represents excellent value for money for the use I've put it to.

It'll be interesting to see whether Rigol addresses this.

I agree that Rigol scopes give you a good value for the money, I don't own a Rigol scope, but I have a Rigol Spectrum Analyzer and an Arbitrary Function Generator, both have worked out great and they are considerably cheaper than the more renowned brands, the problem reported with the scopes is definitely not a work/no work kind of problem,but these bugs are the sort of things that make me cringe and regret buying cheap  (eventhough some of their equipment is in the thousands range) chinese test equipment, it makes you wonder: what else could be wrong?

AFAIK Rigol has been contacted with this issue and they apparently always give a standard response regardless of what the problem is "Update the Firmware", but updating the firmware seems to solve nothing. It appears to affect the entire DS1000 line.